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High School Football Recruiting’s New Face

HALLANDALE, Fla. — Sony Michel is still a high school freshman, yet he has shown flashes of Hall of Fame potential. A tailback for American Heritage in Plantation, Fla., Michel has rushed for 39 touchdowns and nearly 3,500 yards in two varsity seasons.

Michel’s recruitment will also be a test case for a rapidly evolving college football landscape. The proliferation of seven-on-seven nonscholastic football has transformed the high school game, once defined by local rivalries, state championships and the occasional all-star game, into a national enterprise.

With Nike and Under Armour sponsoring teams and ESPNU providing coverage, seven-on-seven football, which is played with no helmets, pads or linemen, has grown quickly in the past three years. Michel plays for the South Florida Express, which attracted more than 190 players and about 40 reporters for its first day of tryouts in February.

Seven-on-seven, once a niche off-season sport run by high schools to keep players in shape, concerns coaches who fear its potential to develop a recruiting culture similar to basketball’s. Many top basketball players are controlled by unscrupulous third parties and street agents.

“Crossroads is probably an appropriate word,” Urban Meyer, the former University of Florida coach, said. “College football is doing great, and it’s the second-most-popular sport in the country, but there’s some things we have to get our arms around.”

The main concern, shared by Meyer, Texas Coach Mack Brown, Notre Dame Coach Brian Kelly and many prominent high school coaches, is the proliferation of third parties and street agents. Those third parties are showing up in the form of nonscholastic seven-on-seven teams and off-season trainers as football drifts from its high school roots.

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A highly regarded freshman, Sony Michel, left, attended tryouts at Hallandale High School for the South Florida Express, a seven-on-seven team.Credit
Josh Ritchie for The New York Times

“The seven-on-seven stuff concerns me,” Kelly said. “It does have an appearance of separating from the high school coach. In football, the head football coach is still relevant. I don’t know if that’s the case in basketball.”

“I think the outside third parties for both sports are a huge concern,” said Rachel Newman Baker, the N.C.A.A. director for agent, gambling and amateurism activities. “They really are the problem, from multiple levels. They have student-athletes’ and their families’ ears.”

Those fears intensified last week when the University of Oregon admitted to paying $25,000 to Will Lyles, who runs a Houston-based scouting service. He essentially directed the recruitment of the freshman tailback Lache Seastrunk. The Ducks also paid $3,745 to Baron Flenory, who runs Badger Sports Elite seven-on-seven camps. The payments, first reported by Yahoo, were cleared by Oregon’s compliance department. Although technically within N.C.A.A. rules, the payments were seen as a sign that football’s recruiting model is becoming more like basketball’s, in which college coaches are beholden to third parties.

“We’re starting to see the surgical removal of high school football coaches from recruiting,” said Chris Merritt, the coach at Columbus High School in Miami. “The sport of football is slowly turning into basketball, from the street agents to A.A.U.-type football.”

That presents challenges for some college coaches. Lyles reportedly accompanied Seastrunk on some visits to colleges, including Texas. Brown declined to comment on Lyles but said he refused to deal with street agents.

“I’m sure that it’s hurt us on some players,” Brown said. “But I also feel like until everything gets legitimized, I don’t want a player on our team who I don’t know who the parents are. I don’t know who he’s listening to. If you get an agent involved in your program, then he’s involved. That scares me. I worry some about the street agents.”

Brown said he had seen cases in which a street agent who was involved with a high school player had ties to professional agents or tried to become the player’s agent. “I’ve seen it on three kids each of the last two years,” Brown said. “So far, that’s not a big enough impact on us to change our lives.”

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Tryouts for the South Florida Express attracted players like Trenton Perriman.Credit
Josh Ritchie for The New York Times

Before leaving Florida in December, Meyer said, he saw a change.

“In the last year and a half, it’s accelerated to the point where at least every day or every other day we were having discussions about third parties and how to handle situations that weren’t there several years ago,” he said.

Seeing high school players tied to professional agents is common in basketball, as agents have long sponsored or been involved with summer teams.

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Newman Baker of the N.C.A.A. said a flurry of agent-related scandals last summer at North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama raised an alarm.

“That is not new news to me,” she said of third parties with ties to N.F.L. agents in high school football. “And obviously that’s a concern for us, especially given what we’ve been through in the last year in that area as well.”

Brett Goetz coaches the Express, one of the country’s elite seven-on-seven teams. He works in financial services and has run the Express as a hobby for four years. Goetz is proud of having built it into a model program in terms of publicity, talent and on-field success.

He welcomed the N.C.A.A. to the February tryout; the organization has been sending representatives around the country to better understand the seven-on-seven phenomenon. Goetz said that he operated his program with integrity and transparency, but that he was not naïve to perceptions of the sport.

Reporter Larry Blustein, interviewed the head coach of the Express, Brett Goetz.Credit
Josh Ritchie for The New York Times

A scene on the second day of the tryout offered a window into seven-on-seven’s power. One of Goetz’s assistants, Jon Drummond, put Miramar High cornerback Tracy Howard on the phone with assistant coaches at Miami and Florida. Howard is a junior, so college coaches cannot call him. But it is legal for Drummond to connect coaches with Howard, who is considered the country’s top cornerback prospect.

Asked if college coaches needed to court their seven-on-seven counterparts the way they talked to high school coaches, Drummond said, “They better.”

“I think it’s just as important as high school football,” Drummond said of seven-on-seven. “It makes recruiting easier. You don’t have to search for coaches; they search for you.”

High school coaches scoff at that notion because they do not consider seven-on-seven real football. Yet South Florida coaches are concerned that players will transfer to schools through coaches they meet playing seven-on-seven. Jeff Bertani, the coach at North Miami Beach, said it contributed to the region’s Wild West recruiting reputation.

“The street agents are now going by the terms of seven-on-seven coaches,” he said, referring to no one in particular. “Before, these guys were advisers and mentors. Now they can say, ‘I’m coaching the team.’ ”

Top recruits like Michel and Howard see only the benefits of playing top competition and traveling. They loved playing for Goetz.

“When you do good in seven-on-seven, you get more recruiting hype,” Michel said. “That’s what got my name out there.”

But for college football recruiting to avoid ending up like basketball’s, Meyer said, no magic solution or N.C.A.A. legislation exists.

“There’s a lot of people wondering how we can control this,” he said. “It’s not an easy question to answer.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 6, 2011, on Page SP1 of the New York edition with the headline: New Face of Recruiting Worries Coaches. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe